In this commentary, you appear to be engaging in sophistry. In other words, you appear to be decisively imparting falsehoods. First you fabricate a definition of the “American elite” comprised exclusively of progressives. Then you fabricate a reality where the mainstream press disseminates lies, where college campuses lack diversity and muzzle free speech and where progressives have fallen down in addressing the problems of the inner cities. Finally you fabricate an argument that the so-called elite have “titles, brands and buzz” but no “demonstrable knowledge or proven character”. This is a perfect example of deflection and psychological projection. You have, wittingly or not, described your populist hero Donald Trump, a man with “brands and buzz”, who disseminates lies, impugns minorities, muzzles the press, cares little about the inner cities and clearly lacks knowledge or character.

– Allan Cooper

Victor Davis Hanson’s Reply:

Dear Angry Reader Allan Cooper

One of the themes of the Angry Reader column is the predictable use by Leftists such as yourself of personal invective (“sophistry”, “falsehoods”, “fabricate”, etc.) along with intellectual laziness.

Take your allegation that I wrote that elites are “comprised exclusively of progressives”.

How does that assertion square with my allusion in the column on elites to “many in the Republican Party as well” or to the “Bush or Clinton families”. Are the Bushes and the Republican Party progressives?

So it is hard to take you seriously when the first allegation you make is demonstrably false.

And it sadly it is all downhill from there:

1) Are you arguing for intellectual diversity on campus? I think the recent Middlebury and Berkeley violence highlights my suggestion that there is little intellectual tolerance on campus.

2) Are you suggesting that the media is not progressive? JournoList, Wikileaks, and the epidemic of fake news from Rathergate and Brian Williams to the MLK bust allegation or Trump’s supposed romps in a Moscow hotel room substantiate the unreliability of the press, which by all polls and its own admission is overwhelming liberal.

3) You doubt the nature of life in the inner city or its governance? The inner cities are in crisis; most have had Democratic mayors and councils for the last thirty years and more; again are you contending that fact?

Donald Trump is not “my populist hero”; can you find any indication that I wrote that?

More to the point: what Trump says and what he actually does are two different things. I will find him guilty of “muzzling the press” when his Justice Department hounds journalists of the Associated Press or taps the communications of a reporter in the fashion of Obama’s treatment of James Rosen, or expands the reach of the NSA and the dissemination of its intelligence or depends on fawning press coverage to advance his agenda in the fashion of the “god”, “smartest president ever” and leg-tingling Barack Obama.

There are various ways of defining knowledge and character.

Trump is, of course, a flawed individual like many of us; but his failings are transparent, quite unlike those of Barack Obama, to take one example (Hillary Clinton is another).

With Trump, what you see is what you get. With Obama and his subordinates we were given constant utopian platitudes about hope and change, but experienced quite different dangerous deeds: expansions of NSA electronic surveillance, lying under oath by Eric Holder and James Clapper, the warping of the IRS, scandals in the VA, GSA, Secret Service, EPA, etc., nullifications of federal law by executive order non-enforcement, the jailing of a video maker on the false narrative of culpability for Benghazi (about which lies were promulgated by Susan Rice), the “echo chamber” manipulation of the “know nothing” press, assassinations abroad of US citizens, bombing Libya without congressional consent, the likely illegal monitoring and leaking of communications of the Trump campaign (as reported by the NY Times, Washington Post, and BBC), constant mellifluous untruth (you can keep your doctor and health plan, the president will not by fiat grant amnesties, the mythologies of the Cairo Speech), and often bizarre references to foreign leaders (from the open mic promise to be more flexible with Putin but only after the election to the gratuitous insults of Netanyahu [“coward”, “chickenshit”]). I learned in farming early on that the loud and uncouth are easier to deal with than the glib and shifty-eyed; the former may assault you senses, but the latter your person and livelihood.

So I think you need to redefine the boundaries of wisdom; they are not just calibrated by “57 states”- and “corps-men”-like Columbia and Harvard degrees.

Surviving the Manhattan real estate cauldron may take more savvy and cunning than the sorts of identity-politics navigation in colleges and liberal circles as outlined in Dreams From My Father. I have spent most of my adult life in two pursuits: academia, often in the circle of those with impressive graduate degrees, and farming with those sometimes without high school diplomas.

I saw little difference among the two groups in terms of ethics, saw the less articulate often more direct and transparent, and could never quite tell which group was the smarter, although what I heard in the faculty lounge and academic senate was a few rings down on the intelligence scale from what I heard and saw when talking to well drillers, pump installers, and tractor mechanics.

A special assistant to the president — the president who recently lamented that an inability to pass gun control was one of the great failures of his administration — was arrested Friday after she allegedly fired a pistol at her boyfriend during a domestic dispute. Barvetta Singletary, 37, didn’t help advance her boss’ crusade against gun violence when she invited her boyfriend, a Capitol Hill police officer, over to her house for sex. Afterwards, she accused him of seeing another woman and demanded to see the texts on his cellphones. When he refused, Singletary reached into her boyfriend’s bag, according to the arresting documents, and pulled out the two cellphones and his service weapon, a .40 caliber Glock 23. She demanded he tell her the passwords to the phones. He refused. “Your phone is more important than me holding the gun on you,” she said, shooting the couch where he was sitting. Singletary was the Obama administration’s House legislative affairs liaison and was paid $125,000 a year. Let’s just say she wasn’t a low-level staffer. And her purposeful gun crime while working for this gun-hostile administration is more important than the time Dick Cheney accidentally shot a friend while Dove hunting. But which one received more news coverage?

May 21, 2015

This is the
> eighth-grade final exam from 1895 in Salina, Kansas, USA. It
> was taken from
> the original document on file at the Smokey Valley
> Genealogical Society and Library in Salina, and reprinted by
> the Salina Journal.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> 8th Grade Final Exam:
> Salina, Kansas – 1895
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Grammar
> (Time, one hour)
>
>
> 1. Give nine rules for the use of capital letters.
>
>
> 2. Name the parts of speech and define those that have no
> modifications.
>
>
> 3. Define verse, stanza and paragraph
>
>
> 4. What are the principal parts of a verb? Give principal
> parts of ‘lie, ‘play,’ and ‘run.’
>
>
> 5. Define case; illustrate each case.
>
>
> 6. What is punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of
> punctuation.
>
>
> 7 – 10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show
> therein that you understand the practical use of the rules
> of grammar.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Arithmetic (Time, 1
> hour 15 minutes)
>
>
> 1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
>
>
> 2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide.
> How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
>
>
> 3. If a load of wheat weighs 3,942 lbs., what is it worth at
> 50cts/bushel, deducting 1,050 lbs. For tare?
>
>
> 4. District No 33 has a valuation of $35,000.. What is the
> necessary levy to carry on a
> school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for
> incidentals?
>
>
> 5. Find the cost of 6,720 lbs. Coal at $6.00 per ton.
>
>
> 6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at
> 7 percent.
>
>
> 7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft.
> long at $20 per meter?
>
>
> 8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10
> percent.
>
>
> 9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the
> distance of which is 640 rods?
>
>
> 10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a
> Receipt.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> U.S. History (Time,
> 45 minutes)
>
>
> 1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided.
>
>
> 2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus
> .
>
>
> 3. Relate the
> causes and results of the Revolutionary War.
>
>
> 4. Show the territorial growth of the United States.
>
>
> 5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas.6. Describe
> three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.
>
>
> 7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell,
> Lincoln, Penn, and Howe?
>
>
> 8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607,
> 1620, 1800, 1849, 1865.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Orthography (Time,
> one hour)
>
>
> [Do we even know what this topic is?]
>
>
> 1. What is meant by the following: alphabet, phonetic,
> orthography, etymology, syllabication.
>
>
> 2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?
>
>
> 3. What are the following, and give examples of each:
> trigraph, subvocals,
> diphthong, cognate letters, linguals.
>
>
> 4. Give four substitutes for caret ‘u.'(HUH?)
>
>
> 5. Give two rules for spelling words with final ‘e.’
> Name two exceptions under each rule.
>
>
> 6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate
> each.
>
>
> 7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with
> a word: bi, dis-mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono,
> sup.
>
>
> 8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the
> following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: card,
> ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last.
>
>
> 9. Use the following correctly in sentences: cite, site,
> sight, fane, fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise,
> rays.
>
>
> 10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate
> pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by
> syllabication.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Geography (Time, one
> hour)
>
>
> 1 What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?
>
>
> 2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in
> Kansas?
>
>
> 3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?
>
>
> 4. Describe the mountains of North America.
>
>
> 5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa,
> Denver, Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fernandez,
> Aspinwall and Orinoco.
>
>
> 6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S.
> Name all the republics of Europe and give the capital of
> each.
>
>
> 8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the
> same latitude?
>
>
> 9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean
> returns to the sources of rivers.
>
>
> 10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give the
> inclination of the earth.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Notice that the exam
> took FIVE HOURS to complete.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Gives the statement
> “he only had an 8th grade education” a whole new
> meaning, doesn’t it?
>
>
> No wonder they dropped out after 8th grade. They already
> knew more than they needed to know!
>
>
> No, I don’t have the answers! And I don’t think I
> ever did!
>
>
> Have fun with this … pass it on so we’re not the only
> ones who feel stupid!